Rendering Time

[LBK Rules]

What is the highest Videolengeth:Rendertime:Videosize that a team has had this year?

Ours is about 8Sec:70Hr(Approx.):720x480.

(I hope you can understand what I am saying. (I havent had a decent sleep since kickoff.))

[Lev]

Originally Posted by LBK Rules

What is the highest Videolengeth:Rendertime:Videosize that a team has had this year?

Ours is about 8Sec:70Hr(Approx.):720x480.

(I hope you can understand what I am saying. (I havent had a decent sleep since kickoff.))

I'd guess ours is 3sec - 10hr - 720x480 - about 10min/frame, which isn't too bad. You probably shouldn't be getting anything above 20min/frame since this is usually a sign of a poor scene management rather than computational complexity.

Here are 3 steps to bring your render times down:
1) split the scenes in parts. As a general rule, each camera shot gets its own max file.
2) Reduce poly count. delete everything not in sight, subsitute everything in the distance with primitive geometry, and apply multires to everything else.
3) Tune down your GI/raytracer settings. Its pretty hard to tell the difference in quality, but the rendertimes will be cut in half

[Matt Hallock]

That's not really true, it more or less depends on the textures in your scene. If you have many materials with reflection and/or a lot of procedural materials (Like the ones I made) your rendertime will be high because of the reflections and having to shift through 18 different levels of bump maps.

Five seconds, 27 hours, about 9-11 minutes a frame was our highest.

I had three computers running on marathon last week to get a 14 second segment done.

[Doug G]

7 seconds : 36 hours (640 X 480)
btw....over 20 min...ha...sure you can have a perfectly optimized scene but get over 20 min render time~!!!!! it depends on complexity of LIGHTING (esp) materials and objects....especially if you are doing some really high detail stuff ....like peeps on Cgtalk etc....they sometimes talk about rendertimes of 7-8 hours a frame!

oops...this is Salik Syed not Doug G posting.... sorry

[Matt Hallock]

Yeah, I've done stills that have taken 8-11 hours to render before. It's not that big of a deal really.

[Lev]

Ok we have a scene with GI, ALL of objects carrying raytrace map, around 300k polycount, and complex particle system with post effects. All of this takes 10 min/frame. You just have to play with the settings - it really pays off.

If you have many materials with reflection and/or a lot of procedural materials (Like the ones I made) your rendertime will be high because of the reflections and having to shift through 18 different levels of bump maps.

Umm... thats lack of optimization. The procedurals can be easily rendered to bitmaps, and so can be the 12 layers of bump maps.

[JamesWu]

Try to also post your computer(s) specs... I have at most 30 sec per frame and just one 2800+ athlon w/ geforce4 mx440.

[Matt Hallock]

Originally Posted by Lev

Ok we have a scene with GI, ALL of objects carrying raytrace map, around 300k polycount, and complex particle system with post effects. All of this takes 10 min/frame. You just have to play with the settings - it really pays off.

Umm... thats lack of optimization. The procedurals can be easily rendered to bitmaps, and so can be the 12 layers of bump maps.

Why would I render layers of bump maps to one bitmap? You completely lose what a procedural is all about. The 12 layers of bump maps would BE what a procedural is. What you're saying is optimization, is poor optimization by decreasing the quality of your materials heavily.

The computers I rendered on were...

Athlon XP 1800+ Overclocked to 2 Ghz
Dual Athlon 1.4 Ghz
Athlon XP 1800+ not overclocked

The Dual Athlon created the fastest render times at about 9 minutes par for the course, the Athlon XP 1800+ overclocked ran 10 minutes, and the non-overclocked XP took 11 to 12 minutes a frame.

[JamesWu]

Wow. Your scenes must be very complex mine don't even reach a minute per frame. Do you have everything happening in one scene? Also, what renderer did you use. In my experience mental ray is alot slower than the default scanline, and vray being even faster. Too bad vray is very finnicky. I haven't tried brazil yet. Anyhow tell me what renderer you guys use.

[Lev]

Originally Posted by Matt Hallock

Why would I render layers of bump maps to one bitmap? You completely lose what a procedural is all about. The 12 layers of bump maps would BE what a procedural is. What you're saying is optimization, is poor optimization by decreasing the quality of your materials heavily.

You will only notice quality decrease if you zoom in/zoom out a lot. In most cases you don't. Why would you need 12 layers of bump map anyways?

I do see one case where having procedural with a lot of layers is justified - landscape. It is huge and you are looking at only small parts at a time, and procedurals add good variation to texture. If this is what you were referring to, i agree with you. But for everything else? why?

[Ricky Q.]

We stole a nice machine to render on:

-Dual 2.4 xeons with hyper threading
-2 gb of high speed ddr ram in dual banks
-fx 1000 quadro card
-dual 36gb SCSI's in raid 0/15,000 RPM Cheetah HDs
-effective data rate to hard drives 640MBs

Really helps us out alot, rendering is continuing today and tommorrow.

[Salik Syed]

btw....displacement also takes a while.
Yes mental ray sometimes takes a bit longer than scaline it depends on the scene but i actually found that mray is a bit faster also the quality is like 20x better

also just having a raytrace map doesn't make it slow there are some other factors like whether it is transparent reflectivity....btw 8-11 hours is for scenes w/ much higher poly count.... 300k is nothing.. esp if you have trees and what not..., the car alone in the 1st scene is 300k polygons the buildings is like 70 k thhe plants are all very high too i forget the grand total ...

[Lev]

Originally Posted by Salik Syed

300k is nothing.. esp if you have trees and what not..., the car alone in the 1st scene is 300k polygons the buildings is like 70 k thhe plants are all very high too i forget the grand total ...

This is exactly why i said its always good to reduce polycount. we had a very high resolution car model which was almost 300k, and after reduction it got down to under 80k with no visual quality loss.

[Matt Hallock]

Originally Posted by Lev

You will only notice quality decrease if you zoom in/zoom out a lot. In most cases you don't. Why would you need 12 layers of bump map anyways?

I do see one case where having procedural with a lot of layers is justified - landscape. It is huge and you are looking at only small parts at a time, and procedurals add good variation to texture. If this is what you were referring to, i agree with you. But for everything else? why?

But if you render out those layers of reflections, bump maps, composites, etc you lose exactly what a procedural is all about.

[Lev]

Originally Posted by Matt Hallock

But if you render out those layers of reflections, bump maps, composites, etc you lose exactly what a procedural is all about.

and what is it about according to you?